Jon Wiederhorn of Noisecreep recently interviewed MASTODON drummer Brann Dailor about the progress being made in the ongoing endeavour that is the followup to Crack The Skye. An excerpt follows:

How much material have you written?

Brann Dailor: "We've got tons of stuff. We've got too much stuff. We go in there every day and just work on it. It's coming out great."

Guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds seemed to take the reigns musically on the initial songwriting for Crack The Skye. Is that the formula you're working with this time?

Brann Dailor: "I think it's a little more collaborative, with everyone chipping in. Brent has a lot of great stuff. [Guitarist] Bill [Kelliher]'s got a lot of cool riffs, too. There are so many, it's hard to know which ones we're gonna use. But we go in and jam all the time and record stuff. Then we sort it out later."

Can you describe the general vibe of the material so far?

Brann Dailor: "It doesn't seem as proggy. There's moments, but it seems more riff-oriented. It seems a little more stripped down. [2004's] Leviathan was a little more stripped down, and it feels like that to me. Everything always changes once you go in the studio, but at the moment it seems like a really super-heavy LED ZEPPELIN or something. It has a lot of that [John] Bonham-esque groove to it, but really heavy and dark. I really like playing like that, and when it goes into those parts, I'm psyched."

Do you have a producer in mind?

Brann Dailor: "We do and he said he'd do it, but nothing's finalized and we still have to meet with some other people just to make sure. But for us, we don't need that much production. We just need to get in a room with somebody and hit record, and if they have some cool ideas, that's cool too. But I don't feel we lack any vision as a band. We usually have everything mapped out, as far as how the story line goes and what the visual imagery looks like. And that kind of plays in your head along with the riffage. We're pretty good at arranging and making the parts flow as a song. We just kind of need somebody to put the mics in the right spots and make it sound great and feed our egos as we go along."

Is there going to be a concept for the record?

Brann Dailor: "Yeah, totally. It's all worked out. I don't want to talk about it yet, though. It's not totally ready, but it's gonna be cool. I feel like it's a classic story about redemption. It's a mythology that's invented because we care so deeply as human beings for one another, it's hard to think that you just go into a hole [after you die] and that's it. So you want to see your loved ones be exalted in some way, or be a part of something that's much more grandiose."

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